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Facebook's return to News sees it tap into human-curation of stories

After deprioritizing news in the News Feed and pivoting to video, Facebook is officially back in the news business again.

The social media giant is rolling out Facebook News to select audiences in the US starting today, carving a dedicated home screen tab out of its digital real estate for users to explore their news interests directly within the Facebook app.

The companys plans for a news service became concrete in CEO Mark Zuckerbergs testimony before the US Congress, during which he labeled News as a big initiative around news and journalism where were partnering with a lot of folks to build a new product thats supporting high-quality journalism.

This is materializing as a partnership with a number of big publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and BuzzFeed.

To that effect, the Menlo Park tech firm is embracing a mix of human and AI-driven approach to curating news in an attempt to fix the problems created by News Feed.

A diverse team of journalists have been tasked with highlighting the biggest news stories of the day, while everything else will be hand-picked by an algorithm depending on your interests.

The company said as many as eight factors facts, diverse voices, original reporting, on-the-record sourcing, timeliness, depth and context, fairness, and local reporting will be taken into account when choosing specific stories across a breadth of topics ranging from politics and world affairs to entertainment and science.

Facebook clearly understands the dangers of algorithmic curation for serving personalized news, for it acknowledges that machine learning has its limits.

Facebook has made several overtures with news publishers in the past, although none of it have worked well neither for the company nor the publishers.

At a time the company is facing a question of trust after whats a string of scandals, its re-entry as a news aggregator should be seen for what it is: another attempt by Facebook to keep users locked into its ecosystem and not depart to its rivals like Snapchat and ByteDance-owned TikTok.

Original article
Author: Thenextweb

TNW is one of the world’s largest online publications that delivers an international perspective on the latest news about Internet technology, business and culture.

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